CHARACTERANALYTICAL VEGETOTHERAPY

The term characteranalytical vegetotherapy was coined by Wilhelm Reich

(1897-1957) in 1936 in Berlin, Germany, and describes his method for the practice of

psychoanalysis. He introduced significant modifications to both the concept of setting

and to the clinical tools used. These would subsequently form the basis for so-called

body-oriented psychotherapies.

Characteranalytical vegetotherapy is based on psychodynamic theory and

introduces the corporeity of the patient as a third element in the psychotherapeutic

setting. The patient’s body, however, takes on diagnostic value, with information

obtained from the “language of the body” (the word character means etymologically

“incised mark”; incised marks from the object relations in the seven corresponding

bodily areas, or “levels”) and it represents a therapeutic guideline. The sense organs

give access to the psychic functions and, together with the analysis of the

characterological traits of the patient, provide insights, which, then, suggest possible

corrective experiences. All of this occurs in the psychotherapeutic setting and in the

context of the most appropriate intersubjective relationship.

Historical Context

Reich became interested in sexology in the 1920s, near the end of his studies on

neuropsychiatry in Vienna, Austria. He was fascinated by Sigmund Freud, and his

approach to psychoanalysis was channeled in that direction from a very young age.

He was also influenced by the ideas of the vitalist philosopher Henry Bergson, by the

theory of Karl Marx, and by several other cultural and scientific contributions of that
time. These included the connection between emotions and the movement of the body

(Elsa Gindler and Elsa Linderberg), the relaxation techniques of Edmund Jacobson

and Johannes Heinrich Shultz, and the medical investigations on the autonomous

(vegetative) nervous system carried out by A. Muller and his team from Leipzig

University. Muller’s results helped Reich to understand the influence of psychism and

the “affects,” or “moods,” in many pathological disorders, later leading to further

development of psychosomatic medicine.

Reich joined the psychoanalytical circle of Vienna but after a few years he

moved to Berlin, attracted by the political and social movements which were starting

there, before Adolf Hitler became predominant. These events put the psychoanalytical

fraternity in a very delicate position. They felt uncomfortable about Reich’s radical

political beliefs, which led to Reich’s expulsion from the newly created International

Psychoanalytic Association.

Persecuted by the Nazis, Reich was given shelter by a group of Norwegian

psychoanalysts, including Ola Raknes and Nic Waal. He settled in Oslo from 1936 to

1939, where he developed his own contribution to psychoanalysis, which would later

be called character-analytical vegetotherapy. The term would be changed to character-

analytical orgontherapy while he was in the United States, where he had emigrated in

1939 when war moved to Northern Europe.

Reich, unlike Freud, did not include a detailed description of his clinical

approach in his writings. After his death, different interpretations of his theories

appeared, with numerous people claiming to continue his work and others who took

some aspects of his clinical approach and developed new techniques such as Rolfing,

bio-respiration, and the primal cry.

 Decades ago, the European Association for Body Psychotherapy was founded,

representing the various approaches that arose from Reich’s work, including bio-

energetic analysis, biosynthesis, the biodynamic approach, somatotherapy and others,

in addition to character-analytical vegetotherapy.

Characteranalytical vegetotherapy continued its own development and

evolution due to the contribution of collaborators and direct disciples of Reich. A few

years before his death in 1975, Ola Raknes sponsored the creation of the first training

institute called the Scuola Europea Di Orgonoterapia, or S.E.Or. (European School

of Orgonotherapy) whose president was the Italian neuropsychiatrist Federico

Navarro (1924-2002), Raknes’s student and collaborator.

Navarro’s work in creating a system of clinical methodology was completed

with the contribution of his students and colleagues, such as Jean Loic Albina in

France and Genovino Ferri in Italy. Ferri has integrated characteranalytical

vegetotherapy with the analysis of the character of the relationship, defining the

relationship as being ‘‘the third complex living system’’ which is born from the

dialogue between the analyst’s and the patient’s traits. Other contributors include

Markus Valimaki in Finland, Clorinda Lubrano in Greece, Bjorn Blummenthal in

Norway, and Xavier Serrano-Hortelano in Spain. Serrano-Hortelano has created a

differential structural diagnostic method, which permits the application of the

methodology according to the structure of the patient (neurotic-adaptive, border-line

or psychotic-mimetic), as well as a focused, psychosocial method known as “brief

characteranalytical psychotherapy.”

Today, there are training institutes for characteranalytical vegetotherapy in

France, Norway, Finland, Italy, Greece, Spain, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.
Characteranalytical vegetotherapy has been recognized as a scientific modality by the

European Association for Psychotherapy.

Theoretical Underpinnings

The clinical aim is for the patient to recover the identity of his or her Ego, which has

been stifled by psychic or somatic defense mechanisms established during a

childhood filled with deficiencies and repressions that have limited their growing-up

process. For this reason, it is necessary for the patient to recover the ability to feel

pleasure and to restore the energetic pulsation, regulating the organism and restoring

psychosomatic health. To achieve all this, the patient must reach balance in the

autonomous (vegetative) nervous system, through analysis and disassembling the

character, which is defined as the muscular armor of the Ego (the mind-body

functional identity). In his work The Function of Orgasm, published in 1927, Reich

wrote that by relaxing the chronic character attitudes, we obtain reactions in the

vegetative nervous system. He stated that we also liberate not only the character

attitudes but also the corresponding muscular attitudes. In this way, part of the work is

moved from the psychical and characterological field to the immediate disassembling

of the muscular armor.

Reich considered a neurosis to be not only the expression of a disturbance in

the psychic balance but also, in a much deeper, well-justified sense, the expression of

a chronic disturbance in vegetative equilibrium and natural mobility. From this

perspective, the psychic structure is therefore, a determinate biophysical structure.

In the characteranalytical vegetotherapy setting, which has been influenced by

Sandor Ferenczi, the psychotherapist adopts a more active role by placing himself or

herself next to, instead of behind, the patient, which he or she does without

abandoning his or her neutral position. The psychotherapist also introduces into the

analytical dynamic the importance of the spontaneous attitudes and of some corporal

aspects of the patient, such as the patient’s manner of breathing or muscular rigidities.

The psychotherapist thus is able to promptly intervene as required, such as through

application of pressure or focused massage.

Reich states that it is surprising to see how the decomposition of a muscular

contraction not only liberates vegetative energy but also reproduces in the memory the

situation in which the repression of the impulse took place. He says that every

muscular contraction contains the story and the meaning of its original creation.

He sensed that there are very different ways of organizing the body’s

defensive mechanisms and thus conceived the therapeutic relationship to be a

dynamic process. He was a pioneer in the description of “borderline” pathology, of

the segmental defensive “armoring” of the neurotic personality, and of the perceptual-

optical split of the psychotic. He gave great importance to the development of

negative transference as the first, necessary step to achieve real, positive transference.

Major Concepts

Most of the major concepts were delineated in the Theoretical Underpinnings section

and include recovering the identity of one’s Ego, which has been stifled by psychic or

somatic defense mechanisms; the relationship between character attitudes and

muscular responses; reaching balance in the autonomous (vegetative) nervous system,

through analysis and disassembling the character; and the importance of focused

massage or the application of pressure in releasing tensions.

Techniques

Characteranalytical vegetotherapy was specifically systematized by Raknes and

Navarro and related to the seven corporeal levels identified by Reich: (1) eyes, ears,

and nose; (2) mouth; (3) neck; (4) chest and arms; (5) diaphragm; (6) abdomen; (7)

pelvis and legs. Navarro assembled Reich’s principal techniques, which he named

“actings,” and introduced additional techniques, outlining criteria for correct use

(time, rhythm, direction) and developing a clinical methodology.

Characternalytical vegetotherapy acts on the autonomous (vegetative) nervous

system, the muscular system, the neuro-endocrine system and on the energetic

pulsation—direct expressions of emotional, affective, and instinctive life. It tends

toward rebalancing these systems. It induces neuro-vegetative phenomena and

emotions, which represent expressions in the language of the body that are essential

for understanding character aspects. Verbalization of the sensations, the emotions and

the associations produced, as well as interpreting significant relationships with the

partial objects of the respective evolutive phases of the life-story of the patient,

represent successive steps in this methodology.

Being Attuned to the Language of the Body

Particularly, the language of the body is the most significant message in the

Reichian psychotherapeutic setting. It accompanies all the other data on “how” the

person is expressing himself or herself: from dreams to lapsus, from symbols to

metaphors, from imaginary life to liberating fantasies and from the type of thought

itself to the characterological trait that sustains it.

Actings

Characteranalytical vegetotherapy investigates the body in its significant

psychic expression through exercises, called actings, which act on the seven bodily

levels. These are specifically selected and performed successively by the patient, who

will experience psycho-affective evolution. The actings reproduce natural ontogenetic

movements that occur at the respective corporeal levels that prevail during the

evolutionary phases.

The actings bring back the “how” of the partial object relations as they were

incised in the corporeal level of the Self at that time and phase, but they also provide

insights. They therefore suggest the possibility of a new object relationship in the

present. Actings connect the “there and then” with the “here and now,” the depth with

the surface, unconscious with conscious, implicit memory with explicit memory,

informing, forming and reforming the mind. They increase cognition and feeling,

determining a higher intelligence of the mind.

During the performance of the actings of vegetotherapy, we give priority to

“the feeling” instead of “the thinking” and therefore we respect the organization of the

evolution of the human being. An analytic therapeutic project aims at giving the

person the capacity to manage his or her defensive armor and characterological

combination.
 Therapeutic Process

From his essay on masochism, in 1927, which was later included in Character

Analysis, Reich begins the integration of character analysis with vegetotherapy on a

clinical level. He initially facilitates the emergence of analytical material (insights) by

pointing out the ways the patients present themselves in the session (tone of voice,

gestures such as crossing legs, looking away or blushing) as well as more permanent

attitudes (compulsive, masochistic, phallic, or hysterical). He also focused on chronic

muscular rigidities (of the neck, chest, pelvis) that influence body posture and its

internal functioning, establishing a tendency to contraction and anxiety

(predominance of the “sympathetic” part of the vegetative nervous system) with

consequent bio-energetic and psychosomatic imbalance.

On specific occasions, he stimulated the output of the voice, increased the

depth of speaking, modified the way of looking, even sometimes suggesting silence,

to provoke emotions in the patient that were related to fears (even unconscious fears),

sadness, or anger. By dismantling the defense mechanisms and the stratified,

segmented stiffness of such defensive armor, a more global involuntary experience

arising from the progress of the therapeutic process could then be added. One such

experience is the “orgasm reflex”—a slight, involuntary movement of the whole body

when a patient, lying on the couch, achieves the capacity to breathe fully and relax

chronic muscular tensions.

Reich considered these to be objective signs of progress towards achieving

clinical goals, while underlining that making the defenses and the armor more flexible

or mobile is a very delicate process, given that they are part of the identity of the
patient. For this reason, and notwithstanding other considerations, careful,

consecutive steps should be followed in relaxing the seven functionally related

corporeal segments in a cephalo-caudal (head-to-foot) direction. In characteranalytical

vegetotherapy, interventions usually focus from the first level (eye, ears, nose) to the

seventh level (pelvis and legs) of the body, bearing in mind that all levels are

interrelated and that partial interventions are not effective. At the same time, it is

necessary to integrate the emotional experience through an analytical elaboration of

the patient-therapist relationship.

Genovino Ferri, Marilena Komi, Xavier Serrano-Hortelano

See also Body-Oriented Therapies: Overview; Orgonomy; Object Relations Theory;

Reich, Wilhelm

FURTHER READINGS

Ferri, G. & Cimini, G. (2012). Psicopatologia e Carattere, L’Analisi

Reichiana: la psicoanalisi nel corpo ed il corpo in psicoanalisi [Psychology and

Character, Reichian Analysis: Psychoanalysis in the Body and the Body in

Psychoanalysis]. Italia: Alpes Editore.

Navarro, F. (1989). La vegetoterapia caracteroanalítica [Characteranalytical

Vegetotherapy]. Revista Somathotherapies et Somatologie Strasbourg.

Navarro, F. (1989). La Somatopsicodinámica [Somatopsychodynamics].

Valencia: Publicaciones Orgón.

Navarro, F. (1991). Caratterologia postreichiana [Post-Reichian

Characterology]. Palermo: Nuova Ipsa Editore.

Reich, W. (1972). Character analysis. Ed. The Wilhelm Reich Trust Fund.

(original work published in 1933)

Reich, W. (2007). The function of the orgasm. New York: Farar, Straus &

Giroux. (original work published in 1927)

Serrano, X. (2011). Profundizando en el diván reichiano. La Vegetoterapia en

la psicoterapia caracteroanalítica [More deeply on the Reichian couch—

Vegetotherapy in Character-Analytical Psychotherapy]. Madrid: Edit.Biblioteca

Nueva.